Brilliant slice of panic! The music and SFX work together with the gameplay super closely to deliver the frantic pace.
One of my only problems with the game, which I realized on maybe my 4th or 5th play, is that there is a subtle mismatch of the mapping between the spacing of the letters on the screen, compared to the spacing of the letters on a standard QWERTY keyboard. This mapping is super important when you're panicked (which the game is well designed to make you), so any mismatch gets translated into mistakes that don't feel as earned or fair.
In particular, the right half of the bottom row of the keyboard begins to shift father to the right than it is on a physical keyboard, due to mismatched placement of "M". On the keyboard, M is placed below and between J and K - however, in Dam It! it is placed between K and L, while N is placed between J and K instead.
This difference makes things look a bit more correct at a glance, since otherwise the bottom row looks a bit empty on the right side, but it sacrifices clarity. I found myself repeatedly hitting the comma key when the game wanted me to press M simply because the game looks as if you should be pressing the key below and between K and L for that - but that key doesn't do anything, it doesn't even show up on the screen when you press it. That difference makes the right half of the bottom row way harder to work with because it's suddenly unintuitive when the rest of the game maps so well. B looks like it's right under H, but that's where N is. N looks like it's between J and K but that's where M is. V looks like it's directly under G but what's under G is actually the gap between B and V.
In the end this is a pretty subtle thing with a very quick fix, but I wanted to point it out because I think it's easy to miss while still having a big impact on how intuitive that corner of the game is, and could remove one of the only points of friction in an impressively smooth experience.
I'd also echo what another commenter said about wanting more feedback about when a leak stops. I think it would help a lot to have something like the SMACK of some flex tape over the leak to let you know you should let go of that one
Probably my only other complaint is that the game felt too tightly tuned to end the game around 1:45. After recording a little footage I realized the limit of keys you can press is only 6. While I do get that some keyboards only have 6-key rollover (though some are even worse), this feels too limiting, since the average person has 9 or more fingers. But it especially feels too limiting when, at 1:45, the game is willing to throw 7 leaks at you at once, and surviving becomes quite literally impossible. What am I supposed to do here?
Altogether, amazing job on this! It all comes together so well, it is instantly understandable, and it's a ton of fun!
Doodle Jump with timed presses!
Overall I think it looks good and the sounds and visual effects feel great. The core loop is simple but fun, and is a good score-chaser.
I was a little disappointed that a lot of the controls basically never come up. Swing and Jump are both pretty much only used once per run, which feels a little clumsy. I feel like this could have been just Left, Right, and Bounce
The gameplay itself is a lot of fun, but there's definitely a slightly degenerate strategy. When playing without this strat, I found the static scrolling of the screen occasionally frustrating - you can pretty easily outpace the screen scrolling, and when you do there's no recourse once you end up too high to react to the next window. It's just guaranteed death, which doesn't feel good.
Another comment mentioned that the timing is very tight, and I actually pretty strongly disagree, and this ties in to my high scoring strategy. I actually think the timing is extremely forgiving - not necessarily because the window for a bounce press is particularly large, but because it is large enough that you can simply mash the bounce button and you will always hit the bounce as long as you're near a window.
To show the disproportionate power of the strat, on the attempt I discovered the degenerate strat I got 7 million points, then on a subsequent run I got over 20 million using it the whole way through.
Basically, after realizing that being high on the screen was a major liability as the speed increases, since it limits the time you have to react, I also noted that there is a large and forgiving window below the screen which does not kill you, but still clearly shows your position. Since mashing the bounce button consistently gets a bounce without the need for timing, at high speeds hovering intentionally below the screen while mashing is optimal, since you maximize your reaction space to the window coming from the top. You simply position under the window as quickly as possible and mash constantly. It then just becomes a test of how quickly you can reposition under the next window, which is always possible, rather than any test of timing. Since you gain height relative to the screen very slowly once you're moving at high speeds, it's very easy to lower yourself again if you get too high on the screen at this point.
I'd also like to note that the score display in the lower left appears to just be wrong. On my high scoring run, the score shown in the bottom of the screen was less than a third of my actual score on the game over screen. I have a screenshot of the leaderboard showing the score mismatching, but itch isn't playing nice with image uploads right now, so lmk if it's helpful and I can send it to you over discord or something.
Overall, great job! I had a lot of fun playing this one.
